“Government funding around the world and particularly in North America propelled growth in the market,” said Sameh Boujelbene, Senior Research Director at Dell’Oro Group. “Additionally, the market benefited from backlog fulfillment during the quarter as supply challenges improved from the first half of the year. While government funding may have benefited mostly the public sector and lower education verticals, we have started to see some signs of recovery in large and even some mid-size enterprises as they resumed spending on campus network upgrades,” added Boujelbene.

“More than 3.3 million of 25 Gbps Ethernet controllers and adapters ports were shipped in 3Q20, surpassing the previous record set in the prior quarter, with strong demand from Tier 1 China-based Cloud SPs and Tier 1 server OEMs as they embraced the technology,” said Baron Fung, Research Director at Dell’Oro Group.

“Demand for SD-WAN is holding up well in the face of the COVID-19 pandemic, especially when compared to hardware-based networking technologies such as access routers,” said Shin Umeda, Vice President at Dell’Oro Group. “Demand for enterprise networking gear has stabilized from the first half of the year, and we see this as a precursor to the SD-WAN market acceleration that we are forecasting for next year,” added Umeda.

“Ongoing softness in the broader enterprise market as well as at some of the Tier 1 Cloud Service Providers (SPs), particularly Facebook and to a lesser extent Microsoft, continued to weigh on the North American market,” said Sameh Boujelbene, Senior Research Director at Dell’Oro Group. “Meanwhile, in line with our expectations, sales in China were up strong double-digits for the second consecutive quarter. This growth in China was blostered by strong demand from Cloud SPs, namely Alibaba, Tencent, Bytedance, and Kuaishou. Other countries in the APAC region as well as in Europe benefited from relaxed lockdown measures as well as some large Telco SPs deals,” added Boujelbene.